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Re: [Phys-l] status of Occam's razor



On 08/02/2007 08:44 AM, Rauber, Joel wrote:

As far as models are
concerned, all models that lead to the correct experimental
predictions are equally acceptable.

Occam's razor not withstanding . . .

Well, in this narrow context, yes, Occam's razor not withstanding.

The point of a good theory is to make correct _predictions_.
Without Occam's razor or something like it, you will have a
hard time /finding/ a theory that makes correct predictions,
but if-and-when you have found such a theory, it doesn't
matter whether you got there via Occam's razor or otherwise.

The flow of dependency is:

Occam's razor ---->\
\
correct predictions ----> theory is good
/
Other schemes ---->/
to prevent
overparameterization

Without Occam's razor or something similar, there will be provably
an infinite number of hypotheses, all of which are consistent with
the /old/ data, but almost none of which reliably _predict_ new data.